5 posts tagged “heroes”
A quite cheery and not all that irritating article over at the Telegraph website congratulates the UK success of Heroes:
This was cult viewing for boys waving imaginary light-sabres, not quality drama.
The only problem with the article is its persistent missing of the point by drawing a distinct but arbitrary and entirely imagined line between two "types" of people ("normal" people and "nerds"), and trying to identify what it is about shows like Heroes and Lost that allows them to break out of their apparently preordained "cult" audiences.
This seems to be a fairly consistent and outdated assumption that traditional news outlets make when dealing with this subject matter... it isn't that the shows are different, it is more that audiences are becoming more accepting of different types of story, or rather, less prejudiced against areas of interest that they don't really understand. Articles like this tend to ignore the massive success of shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation, because it doesn't fit the model of the social situation that they are trying to describe, but shows like this have been doing pretty well for years...
Mass audiences aren't drawn to Heroes because it is about super-powered individuals, any more then the majority of viewers watch Lost because of the island mystery, or Star Trek TNG because of the space travel: All of those shows have that human element, the soap opera effect, that draws people in... that in fact, we tend to crave, even if we wouldn't be seen dead watching Eastenders or Coronation Street. The only shift that is happening among audiences is that they are no longer as likely to be utterly turned off by the more imaginative aspects of the shows.
For sure, the more mainstream success of books like Harry Potter, movies like Lord Of The Rings or Spider-Man, shows like The X Files and Twin Peaks (and less commonly stated examples like Northern Exposure or American Gothic) have softened the ground for the current situation... but the fact is that fantasy literature, science-fiction tv, or comic books... none of these things have really changed the way they do things to appeal to a wider audience. The characterisation, the angst, going on in Heroes is all classic (sometimes, I have to say, even old-fashioned) Marvel comics scripting... the creators of that show haven't done anything different so far than Chris Claremont was doing in The X-Men during the eighties.
The audience, however, is changing. Perhaps it is wrong to say that the viewing public has suddenly decided that they like fantasy... instead, maybe the weight of decades or even centuries of fantastic scenarios in fiction have created a rising amount of fantastic background noise or static, so that now it doesn't even occur to them to dismiss a show because of it. After all, a sizeable chunk of the audience was born in a world that had always had Star Wars and Star Trek and Spider-Man and Superman, and as such didn't even see the phenomena of those things as exceptional.
(By way of comparison, I don't really care about cars, and am not macho at all, but find myself completely absorbed in episodes of Top Gear for the same reason... it is damn good entertainment! The fact that the subject matter doesn't matter to me doesn't even occur to me while it is on. The assumption that only genre fans can be nerds just gets me every time. Every area of interest has it's sub-culture, and every sub-culture it's fanatics, but it is retarded to assume that they are the sum total of that areas' adherents. And god knows, car nerds are just as bad, if not worse, then genre nerds)
What articles like this actually end up highlighting is that traditional news media don't tend to have a clear and accurate barometer of the general public, or if they do, would rather ignore what it tells them in the service of their own reader-base's demographic. That while the population are, at least where entertainment consumption habits are concerned, growing more tolerant and accepting, and enjoying a broader range of quality entertainment because of it (as well as, admittedly, a whole lot of dreck), the news media are stuck in place, circa twenty-odd years ago.
Still, it is nice to see a genre related article like this that isn't headlined: "Biff! Bam! Pow! Superheroes swing onto our screens!"
(This is crossposted from www.nixsight.net)
Well, that sucks... So Drive has already been cancelled?
I can't help but think that, of all the sad cancellations that have happened in the last few years, this one was maybe the most premature... And maybe was a pre-emptive attempt to anticipate a Lost/Heroes backlash. I know Drive's initial viewing figures weren't great, but as premises go, it would seem to have a lot more commercial potential than Firefly or Studio 60... people like car chases, after all, and it's apparent that people like mysterious characters, but it's AS apparent that they don't like it when those characters are too mysterious, or for too long.
Drive was fast enough, dumb enough and slick enough to have broad appeal, but smart, sharp and well presented enough that I think it would have quickly dragged in the more patient or articulate (probably not the right word, but you know what I mean!) audience that persists with Lost (which isn't to say that all of the Lost audience is either of those things!). I don't know how it's been marketed in the US, but I can't help but think that if it wasn't finding a big enough audience by week four to sustain it to at least the end of one season, then there was either something drastically wrong with it's marketing or scheduling, or else there was something really up with how much the whole thing cost, compared to how much it made. It LOOKED like they were doing a lot with a relatively small budget, but I guess my perception could be wrong on that score...
So we've watched the first three episodes of Drive, and I have to say, I'm really impressed... what they've essentially done is they've stripped down the "unfolding mystery" element that has enervated some modern shows since Twin Peaks and later, The X Files really took advantage of it, and made it something that doesn't dominate the concept in the way that it does as a matter of course in a show like Lost or Heroes. Those shows are so concerned with misdirection, obfuscation and interconnected secrets that if a major piece of hidden information isn't dropped every episode, less patient viewers start to get fidgetty. But Drive only really has one dominating mystery, which is all about the organisation running the race, and in some ways can be ignored for weeks at a time, because you don't really NEED to know it to enjoy the frenetic action and self-contained nature of the episodes.
Of course, each character has their secrets, but they aren't the focus of the show, and we're already finding out lots about them, which is refreshing when we spend so much time rivetted week after week to Heroes and Lost, grateful for scraps. Unravelling these characters IS an important part of the fun, but so far Drive seems more concerned with where the players are going as much as where they have been... The race bits are a lot of fun, the fairly basic detective work involved with each car working out that day's destination is engaging and light, so the exploration of the protagonists' backgrounds and motives are just little pockets of data that inform the decisions that they make, rather than being the core of the text.
Both Heroes and Lost do the same thing, but the ratios are shifted around in Drive, so that where those shows are focussed about 20% forward/80% back (and of course, by using time-travel, Heroes manages to fudge that further, so that actually even the 20% forward is also filling in backstory!), Drive is 80/20 the other way.
Plus, the major crash at the beginning of the second episode of Drive is one of the most impressive things I have ever seen on a tv screen... It was such a cool example of taking movie sensibilities and production values into a tv setting, in the way that BSG used to do in every single episode, and the way Lost does every time they revisit the actual plane crash, but at the same time, it genuinely felt like something that we had NEVER seen quite like that before. For me, it was like the first time I saw the plane being ripped apart in Alive, or further back, when the failing aircraft rips through the other plane, spilling occupants, in Memphis Belle. Horrific, intense and chillingly authentic all at the same time.
Also, thus far, the cast and scripts are very good indeed...
And by the way, if you are one of the people on IMDB who keeps complaining about the re-use of locations, or the fact that it's obvious that they're just reusing the same stretches of road, well, you're an idiot. I'm not going to tell you that you should have low expectations of your entertainment, but at the same time, this is tv, with tv budgets. If the choice is between telling a cool story but making reasonable compromises to practicality and cost, or not telling that cool story at all, I'll always choose the opportunity over the resignation. I'll suspend disbelief, because my imagination's strong enough to take the cast all over the US, even if the budget can't.
So, obviously, this isn't news to anyone in the US, but we've got the latest Heroes coming down the pipe as we speak, and will hopefully be able to watch it remarkably soon. I'm relatively confident that the show is going to see this season out shark-jump free, at least by my fairly open-minded standards, and am extremely intrigued to see where they go with it next series. I guess that it's pretty difficult to really screw up the world of the fiction when that world is so firmly based on a soft and floppy take on reality.
The way I see this sort of thing, as with Lost, is that it doesn't even really matter if the edges of all of the plot twists and coincidences match up with each other, as long as they at least appear to under light scrutiny. There will always be viewers who, completely in spite of the way that serial fiction is produced, look too hard at such things and start to see the tiniest inconsistencies as ingrained flaws, but as long as a show is good enough to have a general appeal, those viewers should stay in the (admittedly loud) minority. A nice meta-system running alongside a show will always be a cool idea to reward the close viewer (such as the online conspiracy stuff that comes with Lost), but at a basic level, a show has to hit the most basic requirements to keep a tenable audience. I guess those would be:
- That for the duration of the show, you are entertained enough to not wish you were doing something else.
- That you are interested enough in the premise of the show, you will actively attempt to watch it, one way or another.
- That missing the odd episode is not going to completely kill any understanding of, and so enjoyment of, the show.
Not really adding much here, am I? Sorry.
The other thing I wanted quickly to say is that I find it funny that the IMDB tags attached to Heroes can be read, with very little tweaking, as a whole story by themselves...
"Superhero Nurse Saves The World. She is part of an Interracial Couple with a Biracial Child, suffers Memory Loss, and becomes a Cheerleader in New York City, where there is a Japanese Politician Villain, who ends up Dead."
I'm posting this very quickly here in response to a series of comments that I saw on Wil Wheaton's vox post of over a month ago, simply because no-one that I know in the real world is watching Heroes yet, and it's driving me nuts...
The thing that seems to have caused the most irritation among the people who posted there a few weeks back is the nature of the premonition "Save the Cheerleader, Save the World".
That said... how freakin'* cool was it when Hiro and Ando were discussing the premonition, and realised that they might have been getting it wrong all along; that it might be two seperate hints to the future in one?
Someone on Wil's blog suggested that the time might be ripe for a drama with too much information causing problems, instead of ones with too many hints at information in lieu of actual closure or plot movement. I kind of agree, but in a way, I think that's what that episode of Heroes showed... the protagonists were all so wrapped up in the piece of information about the future that they already had, that they may have jumped to the wrong conclusion based on their initial reading of that information.
(I'm not going to mindlessly cheerlead for the show, by the way... I have my own issues with anything that involves time-travel or warnings passed back down the timeline. But so far, I'm enjoying Heroes quite a lot, from the viewpoint that I had low expectations of how thoughtful the show might be, and thus far it's exceeding them.)
